There’s a lot of emphasis put on website traffic, specifically getting more traffic. But the traffic portion is only 50% of the battle. The other 50% is on the website itself. Does the website make it easy for the user to find the information they want? Is it designed to properly sell what you have to offer?
To answer those questions, you need to understand what visitors are doing when they come to your site. Luckily, there are tools to help you with that information.
The first tool you need is Google Analytics, which is a website stats tracker installed on every page of your site. This will tell you the who, what, when, where, and how of your website traffic. How did they get there? Through social media? Google? Another website? What pages did they visit? How long did they stay on the site? What city are they in? This is all powerful information to ensure your website caters to your prospective customers.
Heat map tracking is a lesser-known but very cool tool to help you better understand how customers are using your site. It tracks the cursor movements and the finger movements on each page that a user visits. It gives you valuable insight into what parts of a page users tend to spend more time on.
For example, if you have a video or important copy that is halfway down your main page, a heat map will show if visitors are scrolling down to that area and spending time there. If they aren’t, you know you need to rearrange the elements on your page or use more graphical elements to move them down the page.
Heat map trackers are not expensive. You can usually find one for around $10/month. Popular ones include Crazy Egg, Lucky Orange, and Mouseflow.
Together, these tools will help you better understand your website traffic so you can make any changes necessary to optimize conversions.
